Written by Claudia Franziska Bruhwiler

Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, PD Dr. rer. publ., is an Associate Editor of VoegelinView and a Lecturer in American Studies and Political Science at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She is author of Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth (Bloomsbury, 2013); and co-editor, with Lee Trepanier, of A Political Companion of Philip Roth (Kentucky, 2017). Her research interests include politics and literature, American conservatism, libertarianism, and migration.

“I’m a novelist, but I’m not Émile Zola.”[1][2]—One phrase that could already squash this article’s premise, namely that Philip Roth should be considered as a public intellectual, as part of a category of writers that became known thanks to Zola’s battle in defense of Alfred Dreyfus who had been unjustly convicted for treason in 1894. “I’m not Émile Zola,” thus…

Since January 2017, some of us may have felt the urge to re-visit, either in our minds or physically, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., “to convince [ourselves] that nothing had changed other than that” Donald J. Trump is now in office (Roth, 2004, 5). And we may still…